nep-hpe  New Economics Papers on History and Philosophy of Economics
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Issue of 2019‒09‒16
nine papers chosen by
Erik Thomson (University of Manitoba
 http://ep.repec.org/pth72


[Selections by Humberto Barreto for SHOE list.]

1. "Positional Views" as the Cornerstone of Sen's Idea of Justice
  Antoinette Baujard; Muriel Gilardone
2. Macroeconomic Dynamics at the Cowles Commission from the 1930s to the
    1950s
  Robert W. Dimand; Harald Hagemann
3. Everything must change, so that the world can remain the same: In
    memory of the life and work of Elmar Altvater
  Mahnkopf, Birgit
4. The Cowles Commission and Foundation for Research in Economics:
    Bringing Mathematical Economics and Econometrics from the Fringes of
    Economics to the Mainstream
  Robert W. Dimand
5. The ideological use and abuse of Freiburg's ordoliberalism
  Dold, Malte; Krieger, Tim
6. How economics forgot power
  Carlos Mallorquin; ;
7. On Artificial Intelligence’s Razor’s Edge: On the Future of
    Democracy and Society in the Artificial Age
  Julia M. Puaschunder
9. The Political Economy of the Prussian Three-Class Franchise
  Sascha O. Becker; Erik Hornung

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1. "Positional Views" as the Cornerstone of Sen's Idea of Justice
  Antoinette Baujard (CREED and Tinbergen Institute, University of Amsterdam,
   Amsterdam, Netherlands); Muriel Gilardone (Normandie Université, Unicaen,
   CNRS, CREM UMR 6211, F-14000, France)
 Our paper offers a novel reading of Sen’s idea of justice, beyond the
 standard prisms imposed by theories of justice – resting on external
 normative criteria – and formal welfarism – involving the definition of
 individual welfare and its aggregation. Instead we take seriously Sen’s
 emphasis on personal agency and focus on his original contribution to the
 issue of objectivity. Firstly, we demonstrate that Sen’s idea of justice,
 with at its core “positional views”, is more respectful of persons’ agency
 than would be a theory based on individual preference or capability.
 Secondly, we argue that Sen’s conception of objectivity considers that both
 information and sentiments are relative to a position. Such an alternative
 approach to subjectivity allows the formation of more impartial views through
 collective deliberation and a better consideration of justice by agents
 themselves.
  JEL: A13 B31 B41 D63 I31
  Keywords: Individual preferences, positional objectivity, sentiments,
   public reasoning, agency, justice
  Date: 2019
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:gat:wpaper:1922&r=hpe

2. Macroeconomic Dynamics at the Cowles Commission from the 1930s to the
    1950s
  Robert W. Dimand (Department of Economics, Brock University); Harald
   Hagemann (University of Hohenheim)
 Jacob Marschak shaped the emergence of monetary theory and portfolio choice
 at the Cowles Commission (which he directed from 1943 to 1948, but with which
 he was involved already from 1937) at the University of Chicago, where he was
 the doctoral teacher of Leonid Hurwicz, Harry Markowitz and Don Patinkin, and
 then from 1955 at the Cowles Foundation at Yale University, where he was a
 senior colleague of James Tobin until moving to UCLA in 1960. Marschak’s
 later attempts to clarify the concept of liquidity and to emphasize the role
 of new information for economic behavior date back as far as to his early
 experiences with hyperinflationary processes in the Northern Caucasus during
 the Russian Revolution. Marschak came to monetary theory with his 1922
 Heidelberg doctoral dissertation on the quantity theory equation of exchange
 (published in 1924 as “Die Verkehrsgleichung”), and embedded monetary theory
 in a wider theory of asset market equilibrium in studies of “Money and the
 Theory of Assets” (1938), “Assets, Prices, and Monetary Theory” (with Helen
 Makower, 1938), “Role of Liquidity under Complete and Incomplete Information”
 (1949), “The Rationale of the Demand for Money and of ‘Money Illusion’”
 (1950), and “Monnaie et liquidité dans les modèles macroéconomiques et
 microéconomiques” (1955), as well as in Income, Employment and the Price
 Level (lectures Marschak gave at Chicago, edited by Fand and Markowitz,
 1951). We examine Marschak’s analysis of money within a broader theory of
 asset market equilibrium and explore the relation of his work to the monetary
 and portfolio theories of his doctoral students Markowitz and Patinkin and
 his colleague Tobin and to the revival of the quantity theory of money by
 Milton Friedman, a University of Chicago colleague unsympathetic to the
 methodology of the Cowles Commission.
  JEL: B22 B31
  Keywords: Jacob Marschak, Money in a theory of assets, Cowles Commission,
   Harry Markowitz, James Tobin
  Date: 2019–09
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cwl:cwldpp:2196&r=hpe

3. Everything must change, so that the world can remain the same: In
    memory of the life and work of Elmar Altvater
  Mahnkopf, Birgit
 Elmar Altvater was a renowned political economist and professor at the
 Otto-Suhr-Institute of Freie Universität Berlin from 1970 until 2006. Until
 his death in 2018 he was a point of reference for several generations of
 students, left-wing academics and politicians, trade union activists,
 representatives of civil society organizations in Germany, across Europe and
 in Latin America. He became one of the few academics in Germany who based the
 analysis of contemporary economic and political developments on a critical
 reading of Marxian approaches to understand the historical cycles of growth,
 recession and crisis in modern capitalism. The following text attempts to
 sketch some elements of a remarkable leftist intellectual history of the
 Federal Republic of Germany through the prism of Elmar Altvater while
 referring to some of the political initiatives Elmar Altvater was involved in
 and touching on some of the most important topics he has dealt with: the
 causes and consequences of the numerous debt crisis; the role of
 neoliberalism which emerged in the course of crisis of world finance since
 the late 1970s; the impact of "finanzialization" on social cohesion and
 politics at national, European and international level and, most importantly,
 his attempt to analyze the degradation of nature as the "price of progress" -
 on the basis of an ecologically expanded critique of political economy.
  Keywords: Marx,capitalism,critical political economy,debt
   crisis,globalization,nature
  Date: 2019
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:ipewps:1232019&r=hpe

4. The Cowles Commission and Foundation for Research in Economics:
    Bringing Mathematical Economics and Econometrics from the Fringes of
    Economics to the Mainstream
  Robert W. Dimand (Department of Economics, Brock University)
 Founded in 1932 by a newspaper heir disillusioned by the failure of
 forecasters to predict the Great Crash, the Cowles Commission promoted the
 use of formal mathematical and statistical methods in economics, initially
 through summer research conferences in Colorado and through support of the
 Econometric Society (of which Alfred Cowles was secretary-treasurer for
 decades). After moving to the University of Chicago in 1939, the Cowles
 Commission sponsored works, many later honored with Nobel Prizes but at the
 time out of the mainstream of economics, by Haavelmo, Hurwicz and Koopmans on
 econometrics, Arrow and Debreu on general equilibrium, Yntema and Mosak on
 general equilibrium in international trade theory, Arrow on social choice,
 Koopmans on activity analysis, Klein on macroeconometric modelling, Lange,
 Marschak and Patinkin on macroeconomic theory, and Markowitz on portfolio
 choice, but came into intense methodological, ideological and personal
 conflict with the emerging “Chicago school.” This conflict led the Cowles
 Commission to move to Yale in 1955 as the Cowles Foundation, directed by
 James Tobin (who had declined to move to Chicago to direct it). The Cowles
 Foundation remained a leader in the more technical areas of economics,
 notably with Tobin’s “Yale school” of monetary theory, Scarf’s computable
 general equilibrium, Shubik in game theory, and later Phillips and Andrews in
 econometric theory but as formal methods in economic theory and econometrics
 pervaded the discipline of economics, Cowles (like the Econometric Society)
 became less distinct from the rest of economics.
  JEL: B23 B41 C01 C02
  Keywords: Cowles Commission, Formalism in economics, Mathematics in
   economics, Cowles approach to econometrics
  Date: 2019–06
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cwl:cwldpp:2198&r=hpe

5. The ideological use and abuse of Freiburg's ordoliberalism
  Dold, Malte; Krieger, Tim
 In the aftermath of the Eurozone crisis, a "battle of ideas" emerged over
 whether ordoliberalism is part of the cause or the solution of economic
 problems in Europe. While German ordoliberals argued that their policy
 proposals were largely ignored before and during the crisis, implying a too
 small role of ordoliberalism in European economic policy, critics saw too
 much ordoliberal influence, especially in form of austerity policies. We
 argue that neither view is entirely correct. Instead, both camps followed
 their ideological predispositions and argued strongly in favor of their
 preconceived Weltanschauung. The ordoliberal Freiburg School ceased being an
 active research program and instead grew to resemble a "tradition" whose
 proponents shared a certain mindset of convenience. As a result, ordoliberal
 thinking was both used and abused by its proponents and critics to emphasize
 their ideologically framed policy recommendations. The present paper analyzes
 this ongoing debate and reflects on how the different ideological camps refer
 to the Freiburg School to push their own agendas. Building on this
 discussion, we end our paper with some constructive thoughts on how a
 contemporary ordoliberalism might want to react to some of the challenges of
 the ongoing Eurozone crisis.
  JEL: B29 D43 E61 G18 P16
  Keywords: Freiburg School,Ordoliberalism,Eurozone Crisis,Austerity,Ideology
  Date: 2019
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:wgspdp:201904&r=hpe

6. How economics forgot power
  Carlos Mallorquin (Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas); ;
 The article discusses a recent book publication by Philip Pilkington, in
 which an interesting and novel reconceptualizing of the investment
 (accumulation) process and economic growth is proposed. The gaze and critique
 through which the book is examined underlines certain theoretical
 similarities found in the Latin American economic discourse during the
 1950´s, denominated as “Latin American structuralism”, in Anglo Saxon or
 European academia. Central to its perspective is the examination of economic
 formations and its agents as a configuration of power asymmetries.
  JEL: B22 B41 B50
  Keywords: Desarrollo, crecimiento económico, asimetrías.
  Date: 2019–08–01
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cjz:ca41cj:53&r=hpe

7. On Artificial Intelligence’s Razor’s Edge: On the Future of
    Democracy and Society in the Artificial Age
  Julia M. Puaschunder (The New School, NY)
 The introduction of Artificial Intelligence in our contemporary society
 imposes historically unique challenges for humankind. The emerging autonomy
 of AI holds unique potentials of eternal life of robots, AI and algorithms
 alongside unprecedented economic superiority, data storage and computational
 advantages. However, the introduction of AI to society also raises ethical
 questions. What is the social impact of robots, algorithms, blockchain and AI
 entering the workforce and our daily lives on the economy and human society?
 Should AI become eternal or is there a virtue in switching off AI at a
 certain point? If so, we may have to define a ‘virtue of killing’ and a
 ‘right to destroy’ that may draw from legal but also philosophical sources to
 answer the question how to handle the abyss of killing with ethical grace and
 fair style. In light of robots already having gained citizenship and being
 attributed as quasi-human under Common Law jurisdiction, should AI and robots
 be granted full citizen rights – such as voting rights? Or should we simply
 reap the benefits of AI and consider to define a democracy with different
 classes having diversified access to public choice and voting – as practiced
 in the ancient Athenian city state, which became the cradle of Western
 civilization and democratic traditions spread around the globe. Or should we
 legally justify AI slaves to economically reap their benefits, as was common
 in ancient Rome, which became the Roman Law legal foundation for Continental
 and some of Scandinavian Law traditions and which inspired very many
 different codifications around the world. Finally, we may also draw from the
 Code Napoléon, the French Code Civil established under Napoleon in 1804,
 which defined male and female into two classes of human with substantial
 right and power differences, and – to this day – accounts for one of the few
 documents that have influenced the whole world in legal and societal ways. In
 asking critical questions and unraveling the ethical boundary conditions of
 our future artificial world, the paper thereby takes a descriptive – afar
 from normative – theoretical angle targeted at aiding a successful
 introduction of AI into our contemporary workforce, democracy and society.
  Keywords: AI, Artificial Intelligence, Athenian city state, Code Civil,
   Code Napoléon, Democracy, Right to destroy, Roman Law, Slavery, Society,
   Workforce
  Date: 2019–04
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:smo:cpaper:5jp&r=hpe


9. The Political Economy of the Prussian Three-Class Franchise
  Sascha O. Becker; Erik Hornung
 Did the Prussian three-class franchise, which politically over-represented
 the economic elite, affect policy-making? Combining MP-level political
 orientation, derived from all roll call votes in the Prussian parliament
 (1867–1903), with constituency characteristics, we analyze how local vote
 inequality, determined by tax payments, affected policymaking during
 Prussia’s period of rapid industrialization. Contrary to the predominant view
 that the franchise system produced a conservative parliament, higher vote
 inequality is associated with more liberal voting, especially in regions with
 large-scale industry. We argue that industrialists preferred self-serving
 liberal policies and were able to coordinate on suitable MPs when vote
 inequality was high.
  JEL: D72 N43 N93 P26
  Keywords: inequality, political economy, three-class franchise, elites,
   Prussia
  Date: 2019
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_7801&r=hpe

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